Software Defect Association Mining and Defect Correction Effort Prediction

Much current software defect prediction work concentrates on the number of defects remaining in software system. In this paper, we present association rule mining based methods to predict defect associations and defect-correction effort. This is to help developers detect software defects and assist project managers in allocating testing resources more effectively. We applied the proposed methods to the SEL defect data consisting of more than 200 projects over more than 15 years. The results show that for the defect association prediction, the accuracy is very high and the false negative rate is very low. Likewise for the defect-correction effort prediction, the accuracy for both defect isolation effort prediction and defect correction effort prediction are also high. We compared the defect-correction effort prediction method with other types of methods: PART, C4.5, and Na¨ıve Bayes and show that accuracy has been improved by at least 23%. We also evaluated the impact of support and confidence levels on prediction accuracy, false negative rate, false positive rate, and the number of rules. We found that higher support and confidence levels may not result in higher prediction accuracy, and a sufficient number of rules is a precondition for high prediction accuracy

A modified multi-class association rule for text mining

Classification and association rule mining are significant tasks in data mining. Integrating association rule discovery and classification in data mining brings us an approach known as the associative classification. One common shortcoming of existing Association Classifiers is the huge number of rules produced in order to obtain high classification accuracy. This study proposes s a Modified Multi-class Association Rule Mining (mMCAR) that consists of three procedures; rule discovery, rule pruning and group-based class assignment. The rule discovery and rule pruning procedures are designed to reduce the number of classification rules. On the other hand, the group-based class assignment procedure contributes in improving the classification accuracy. Experiments on the structured and unstructured text datasets obtained from the UCI and Reuters repositories are performed in order to evaluate the proposed Association Classifier. The proposed mMCAR classifier is benchmarked against the traditional classifiers and existing Association Classifiers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Association Classifier, mMCAR, produced high accuracy with a smaller number of classification rules. For the structured dataset, the mMCAR produces an average of 84.24% accuracy as compared to MCAR that obtains 84.23%. Even though the classification accuracy difference is small, the proposed mMCAR uses only 50 rules for the classification while its benchmark method involves 60 rules. On the other hand, mMCAR is at par with MCAR when unstructured dataset is utilized. Both classifiers produce 89% accuracy but mMCAR uses less number of rules for the classification. This study contributes to the text mining domain as automatic classification of huge and widely distributed textual data could facilitate the text representation and retrieval processes